A baffling, patience-taxing, oddball sci-fi movie that makes little sense, Brazilian filmmaker Eder Santos’s Blue Desert centers on a young man named Ele (Odilon Esteves) who is unmoored in time, space, and reality at a distant point in the future. Yearning for transcendence, Ele appears each day on a flight that takes him wherever he’s going (though he has no say in the matter). Appearing alone in a desert, Ele hopes that he can achieve a lofty spirituality, but he invariably crosses paths with an older man who is determined to spray-paint the desert blue. Elsewhere, Ele appears at a dance-club party where his lack of practice communicating with others is challenged by meeting Alma (Maria Luísa Mendonça), who may not be any more real than anything else in this meandering, chilly movie. If Blue Desert is intended to make a provocative impact through its surrealist collision of dreamlike images and ideas, it falls far short of the mark. Not recommended. (T. Keogh)
Blue Desert
IndiePix, 94 min., in Portuguese w/English subtitles, not rated, DVD: $24.99 Volume 33, Issue 5
Blue Desert
Star Ratings
As of March 2022, Video Librarian has changed from a four-star rating system to a five-star one. This change allows our reviewers to have a wider range of critical viewpoints, as well as to synchronize with Google’s rating structure. This change affects all reviews from March 2022 onwards. All reviews from before this period will still retain their original rating. Future film submissions will be considered our new 1-5 star criteria.
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